blocks away from her house. Across the street was Yitz’s Deli, a long-standing Toronto fixture where the robust fragrance of corned beef had decades ago settled permanently into the sidewalk in front of the store.
On their way to their table they passed a cooler filled with jars of dill pickles and pickled red peppers. Nesha flipped the over-long pages of the laminated menu and grinned. “This is my kind of place. We don’t have anything like this in San Francisco. I guess we’ve assimilated too well.”
He ordered a pastrami sandwich on rye and a kishka. She watched him eat in wonder as she nibbled at her salad. She would’ve been up all night with such fare.
“What’s it like in San Francisco?”
The food had relaxed him. His black eyes gleamed in the soft light of the booth. “The most beautiful place on earth,” he said. “Not just the city itself. The bay. All the little towns around it. I can see the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance right outside my window. It’s like a misty piece of art. There’s something new each time the light shifts. I read somewhere there was an artist who painted a haystack a hundred times, each time in a slightly different light. That guy would’ve loved the Golden Gate Bridge.”
“Monet,” she said. “It was Monet.” She was reminded of David and the connection made a piece of lettuce stick in her throat.
“I’m a little disoriented here because of the flatness. My house is set into the side of a hill and the eye is constantly moving up. Very exciting, really. You’ve heard of ‘sea legs’? Well, a few times I’ve had to catch myself from keeling over here because I keep expecting a hill where there isn’t one.”
“I don’t believe that for a moment,” she said, smiling.
“Well, I invite you out west to check it out. Come visit me and I’ll take you up all the good hills.”
“What about your family?”
“My son’s away at college. I’m alone in the house.” Then, “Who’s at your house?”
“I’m a widow. My husband died last fall.”
Nesha shrunk back in his seat. “I’m sorry. Then you’re still in mourning. That’s the sadness I saw.”
“Is it that obvious?”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “Only to someone else in pain.”
Tears stung her eyes without warning and she turned away. “I promised myself I wouldn’t cry in front of people.”
He reached out a hesitant hand. “I’m flattered that you feel safe enough with me.”
He pulled back when the waiter approached. “Would you like some coffee?” Nesha asked.
“You know, my house is just around the corner,” she said. “I can make us some coffee.”
She unlocked her front door and felt him follow her in. It was an odd feeling, bringing a strange man into the house after ten.
She turned on the light in the kitchen. “I only have decaffeinated coffee.”
“You’re too young for your diet,” he said. Suddenly he yawned.
“You must be tired,” she said.
She led him into the den and turned on a lamp. “Make yourself comfortable and I’ll bring in the coffee.”
“Black,” he said and sat down heavily on the L-shaped sofa.
She was carrying the cups into the den when she stopped in her tracks: he was fast asleep on one L of the sofa, lying with his knees up toward his chest, hand under his head. He had taken off his shoes. The gun lay nearby on a coffee table. His face had softened, the eyebrows dark and finely formed against the skin. There was something touching about the shape he had taken. Something vulnerable and young that was hidden while he was awake. It was probably self-defence after all he had been through. Suddenly she saw him ten years old, thin and dirty, spinning through the indifferent Polish woods, eyes filled with terror and grief, too preoccupied trying to stay alive to mourn for his family. She had the inexplicable urge to take that boy in her arms and stroke his hair, tell him everything would be all right. Only she knew it wouldn’t be. It would never be all right again.
She covered him with an afghan that lay nearby and turned the lamp off in the den. In the kitchen she poured the coffee back into the pot. She was dead tired herself but something was nagging at her. She knew what she had to do, but dreaded doing it. It was her own fault for putting the art books in the basement.
She opened the door that led downstairs and turned on the light. Her heart shrank as she stepped down the carpeted stairs. Without looking at David’s paintings stored upright in the unfinished part of the basement, she approached the bookcase. She pulled out a thick volume on the Renaissance and plopped down on the nearby sofa with it. The old tweedy couch had been in their first apartment when they got married and Rebecca felt a twinge in her chest.
Checking the index references on Raphael she began to look up page numbers. She pushed past Madonnas and the St. George and the Dragon motifs that Raphael had been so enamoured of. She flipped pages impatiently and finally lost hope. Too many Renaissance artists to include more than a token of each. Then all of a sudden, there it was.
The nobleman with averted eyes beneath a perfect brow and the sensuous mouth of a girl. Below: Portrait of a Young Man, formerly in Krakow, Czartoryski Collection. She searched for elaboration in the text but the author was more interested in playing the profound art critic than imparting any practical knowledge:
There has been a tendency to recognize Francesco Maria della Rovere, up to 1516 the Duke of Urbino, in the Czartoryski portrait of a young man of a beauty that is almost feminine, but cruel. But even if the identification is rejected today it is still the typical image of a lord of the cinquecento, refined and ethically insensible, in this face that looks at us contemptuously from the chromatic glory of the rich vestments....
Krakow, Rebecca thought. Her mother-in-law had grown up in Krakow. And hadn’t been back since the war. Understandably, since most of her family had been killed in the vicinity. But Sarah was a resilient person, well-read and cultured, and it was just a little question she had for her. As long as they didn’t talk about David.
Rebecca checked her watch. Just ten-thirty. She wouldn’t tell Sarah she had a stranger sleeping on her den sofa. She picked up the old phone extension they kept downstairs and dialed Sarah’s number.
“Hello dear, is anything wrong?” Sarah asked in her dramatic, scrupulous accent when she heard Rebecca’s voice. Rebecca usually called her weekly on Sundays.
“No, no. Everything’s fine.” Yeah, sure. Rebecca pictured Sarah’s slightly waved auburn hair, chin length and perky for a woman of sixty-one. “I just had a question I thought you might be able to answer.”
“Yes?”
“Have you heard of the Czartoryski Collection in Krakow?”
“Oh, Czartoryski.” She pronounced the cz like cb. “ Yes, of course. They were an old aristocratic family in Poland. They collected art. All kinds of art. So what can you do when you have a mansion full of paintings and tapestries and beautiful furniture? You graciously
